To consider the origins of the idea of accelerating change, we should
briefly go back to a much earlier one, that of progress itself. As historian
J.D. Bury reminds us in his masterwork, The
Idea of Progress, 1921, the idea of progress in any human domain
other than spiritual (e.g., social, intellectual, technical), versus
stasis, decline from a previous Golden Age, or cyclic fluctuation, has
been a quite recent emergence in human history. We see no evidence for
it at the start of human civilization in Mesopotamia with the Sumerians,
circa 3,500 BCE. Surprisingly, it was missed entirely by Greek civilization
during its "Golden Age" of imperial democracy and scientific
flowering, 500-300 BCE Even the rise of the Roman empire was not explicitly
(e.g., in the written record) associated with progress! Consider the historical
context. Great empires had a long history of rising and falling. Most
intelligent folk simply could not believe in the idea of continual progress
when the pay for the Roman soldier was a fixed number of denari for the
last three centuries of Roman rule (e.g., 100-400 A.D). The idea became
further untenable in the West as Rome itself collapsed, as city sizes
shrunk, and as Europe entered long political and ideological eras of escalating
warfare and repression.

Amazingly, a millenium of post-Roman regression in the scale of organization
of human social systems had surprisingly little impact on the continuing
acceleration of technological progress, the steady advance of artifice,
machines, and tools that made cottage industries into factories and irreversibly
eroded feudalism. As social systems decentralized in the post-Roman era,
the scale of technological innovation, transfer, and diffusion simply
readjusted to the more localized social systems of the era. After the
fall of Rome, no massively centralized government remained to maintain
elaborate aqueducts, roads and cities. Nevertheless a number of other
more scale-appropriate technologies accelerated in complexity and diversity.
Even religious institutions, for all their repressive activities, were
swept up in a desire for practical technological innovation. Consider
the water wheel, which spread rapidly across Europe after 700 CE, one
of many artifacts built by industrious Benedictine monk-engineers. The
desire for useful innovation was widespread, and became steadily more
institutionalized. By 1086 CE England and Wales had built 5,600 water
mills for 1.3 million inhabitants, as recorded in the Domesday book, a
meticulous national survey conducted by King William I. By the latter
half of the European "Dark Ages" of 400-1400 CE, water wheels
were used for felting cloth, sawing wood, making paper, grinding flour,
all manner of activities that saved human labour. Complicated clutches,
gears, cams, and other mechanisms had emerged to transfer the rotational
motion of the wheel to reciprocating motion for machines. This and other
fors of early industrialization created an accelerating use of energy
per capita in an era originally labelled "Dark" because of its
religious and social strictures. But this label is a bit of a misnomer,
as even the clergy were being seduced by technology. By 1200 CE Franciscan
monks had adopted the doctrine that they were getting closer to God by
practicing the "useful arts" of technology.

For more on how rapidly technology continued to diffuse during the "Dark
Ages," see this technology chart,
and for the details, see historian Lynn White's superb Medieval
Technology and Social Change, 1966. Unlike human social systems,
which oscillate on a pendular dynamic between phases of centralization
and decentralization, technological evolutionary development has been
on a much more smoothly accelerating, and increasingly self-catalyzing
trajectory. Technology is moving toward its own true autonomy.

During the Middle Ages, the great rich-poor divides of the Roman era
were flattened back to more equitable social structures. The pendular
swing (cycle) between plutocratic income inequity and democratic income
equalization is a basic feature of civilization, as I have written elsewhere.
Consider the the way that modern globalizationmulti-local and decentralized
versus previously centralized economic developmentwill rationalize
First and Third World divides over the remainder of this century, lifting
the developing world far more than the developed one. To many of us in
the First World, afflicted with such excesses of success as obesity, endless
entertainment, and a decreasing desire to sacrifice, the next few decades
may seem like a time of relative "stagnation", backsliding,
or incremental improvements by comparision to previous periods of dramatic
advance. Our accelerating technology can easily provide more benefits
than the finite and information-overloaded human mind can absorb.

But like the European Dark Ages, should such unfortunate socioeconomic
events come to pass, don't let that fool you into concluding that technology
is also subject to the whims of social fluctuations. It's advances march
forward to an increasingly independent beat every year. To the emerging
nations and the planet as a whole, the accelerating impacts and benefits
of technology in coming years will be conveyed far more broadly and rapidly
than the ones that gave those of us in the First World our enviably high
standard of living. Accelerating change never slows down, it just moves
to new substrates (e.g., technology vs. biology) and dives "under
the hood," (e.g. Third World vs. First World advances), becoming
less obvious from certain human perspectives.

As Bury notes, the idea of progress in the material realm was contested
quite a bit in social discourse over the the entire European Renaissance
(1300's to 1600's, 14th-17th century). The explosion of printing across
after Gutenberg in 1450, two million books and ten million
pamphlets across Europe in just the first 50 years of the movable metal-type
press, fueled a revival of Classical ideas, but folks weren't ready to
see all the change around them as adding up to inexorable improvements.
Only by the 1650’s, near the end of this cultural explosion, did the idea
of an unstoppable force of progress, driven by human ingenuity, finally
win in the minds of the literate and upper classes, and from that point
forward, progress became the dominant metaphor of Western civilization.
Leading arguments for the new style of thinking is well captured in the
synthetic works of such pioneers as Jean Bodin (Method,
1566 and Colloquium, 1588) and Francis Bacon (e.g., Novum
Organum, 1620, The New Atlantis, 1626), each considered forerunners
of the scientific method.

The idea finally infected the public consciousness during the European
Enlightenment, 1650-1800, beginning with such thinkers as Renes Descartes
(Discourse on Method, 1637), Blaise Pascal (Pensees,
1660), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet more than any other
single individual it was Isaac Newton, and his discovery
of the laws of motion and universal gravitation, published in Principia
Mathematica, 1687, that drove the Enightenment ideals of reason,
individualism, and human progress into mass consciousness. Principia
exposed the predictability of a vast array of physical processes, and
pointed the way to their understanding and mastery via reason and science.
A century later, American and French philosophers and statesmen and women
such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin,
Marquis de Lafayette, and Olympe de Gouges, would
build Enlightenment ideals and ideas into truly new democratic political
structures in the American and French Revolutions.

Technological progress in particular was promoted by such late Enlightenment
scholars as Anne-R-J Turgot, Reflections on Formation and Distribution
of Wealth, 1766, who noted the "inevitable" march of technological
progress that had occurred even during Medieval Europe. Peripheral observations
on the inexorable quickening of technology also appeared in Adam Smith's
writings (1723-1790).In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,
1793, the transcendentalist William Godwin, possibly the earliest
transhumanist philosopher, predicted that advancing knowledge and
information dissemination must lead to the inevitable ascendancy of mind
over matter, including a shrinking of the importance of the state relative
to the individual, an eventual “total extirpation of the infirmities of
our nature,” and extension of human life “beyond any limits which we are
able to assign.”Curiously, he also predicted the decline of biological
procreation as part of this transition, a phenomenon that has been observed
in all first world countries in recent decades.

First Industrial
Revolution (1760-1840) events inspired the historian August Comte
when he formulated his sociological "law of progress" in the 1830's. As
the progress meme spread, scholars such as Karl Marx (1818-1883),
and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) began crafting their own elaborate
theories of human progress toward what they conceived as socially desired
ends. Public belief in accelerating progress emerged first in
Europe and America in the Second
Industrial Revolution, reaching a peak in the 1860's with steam and
railroad fever, and running right up to World War I in 1914. But this
belief was perhaps more a mania, like the Tulip mania of the 1630's, and
all the subsequent economic bubbles since. It wasn't yet grounded in any
theory of change.

This era also saw the Russian futurist and father of transhumanism, Nicolai
Fyodorov (1827-1903), who theorized about the eventual perfection
of human bodies and society, advocated for space and ocean colonization,
and whose posthumously-published two-volume work, Philosophy of the
Common Task (1906) argued that the highest common purpose of humanity,
and a way reduce violence in human culture, must be scientific research
on radical life extension, discovery of methods of physical immortality
(presaging modern ideas of chemopreservation and uploading), and even
efforts to resurrect the dead (the ultimate aims of modern history and
anthropology, one might argue). While these early social progress models
had shortcomings, they showed vastly greater subtlety and maturity than
earlier utopian writings, such as those of Plato (427-347 BCE)
and Thomas More (1478-1535 CE).

All developmentalist progress models assume a trajectory, a hierarchical
emergence that must unfold over many years and stages to achieve a long-term,
developmentally guided end, just as in biological development. It is our
position that the best of these models are what we may call evolutionary
developmental, or "evo devo." They recognize that only the general
outlines or broad properties of each developmental emergence can be statistically
determined. The bulk of the particulars in evolutionary developmental
emergences are always evolutionary, by which we mean unpredictable, creative,
and locally unique events. We see this in the unique, selectionist, adapted
particulars within any developing organism. Ttwo identical twins, for
example, are unpredictably unique in molecular organization, tissue-architecture,
fingerprints, brain wiring, etc. So it is likely to be on any two Earth-like
planets in an Evo
Devo Universe (Smart 2008). Mostly unique local evolutionary events,
but also with a few highly-similar developmental emergences as well.

Earth's First
Singularity Theorist  Henry Adams

All of this set the stage for a historian by the name of Henry Adams,
who in the 1890's began documenting the rapid development of science and
technology at the turn of the century. It was Adams, observing the profound
new forces of the dynamo, the internal combustion engine, and the railroad,
who was apparently the first in the written record to explore the idea
of the inevitable acceleration of progress leading to a coming global
"phase change" (commendably, he even used this physical analogy)
in environmental dynamics. A century later, the mathematician and science
fiction author Vernor Vinge would aptly term this phase
transition a "technological singularity."

Adams was the great-grandson of U.S. President John Adams (the
second President of the U.S.) and grandson of John Quincy Adams
(sixth President of the U.S.), so he had daunting shoes to fill. He rose
to this challenge by becoming one of the most thoughtful historians of
technology that we have yet had. Adams', The Education of Henry Adams,
1918, is considered one the greatest autobiographies in U.S. history.

Adams technological singularity insights first appear in rough form in
"A Law of Acceleration",
an essay written in 1904 in which he first surmises the existence of "A
law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics, [which]
cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man."

He further develops these ideas in, "A Rule of Phase Applied to History,"
1909 (contained in Degradation
of the Democratic Dogma,
1919), a treatise which proposes that the world may now be engaged in
an inexorable acceleration toward a coming phase change in the relationship
between technology and humanity, some time between 1921 and 2025. Adams
used the phase change concept in the same vein as Josiah W. Gibbs
(of Gibbs Free Energy and Gibbs Phase Rule fame), the brilliant Amercian
chemical physicist who described systems thermodynamics and equilibria
changes in terms of energy and entropy.

In "A Rule of Phase," Adams speculates that a simple "Law of
Squares" much like Newtonian inverse square laws, determines (statistically,
as in Gibb's rule) the average duration of each new phase in a developmental
process of local computational complexity. He envisioned a 90,000 year
Religious Phase (what we might today call the Age of Modern Humans,
Jared Diamond's "Great Leap Forward" of complex
linguistic and cultural innovation which began circa 100,000 years ago
in Africa, and led to the behaviorally modern Cro-Magnon invasion of Europe
40,000 years ago), followed by a 300 year Mechanical Phase (e.g., Industrial
Information and Computer Ages), followed by a 17 year Electrical Phase
(e.g., the Symbiotic Age), followed by a 4 year Ethereal Phase
(e.g., Autonomy Age), which would subsequently "bring Thought
[from the human perspective] to the limit of its possibilities." Given
the difficulty of timing the start of each phase, he suggested that the
asymptote (the phase change singularity) might occur anywhere between
1921 and 2025. Stunning foresight for 1909!

Some other quotations from this important work: "A law of acceleration,
definite and constant as any law of mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax
its energy to suit the convenience of man." He also wryly notes that "Fifty
years ago [e.g., the 1850's], science took for granted that the rate of
acceleration could not last." In an interesting side note, Adams considered
his conventional education to be "defective," because it did
not equip him to either understand or live properly in a world of accelerating,
transformational science and technology. Almost 100 years later, I'd have
to agreefor the most part, U.S. education and culture remain painfully
acceleration-unaware, something I hope will start to change in coming
decades.

As important as Adam's insights were, they were not yet enough create
a critical mass of new thinking on the subject of change. When his articles
came out in 1909, at the dawn of the Age of Automation, we seemed, given
the magical technological innovations of the previous 20 years (suddenly,
the auto, the aeroplane, the electric light, mass electrification, the
phonograph, movies, and other marvels of Edison, Tesla, and others) very
nearly ready to collectively believe the idea of intrinsically accelerating
progress. But then came mechanized warfare (WW I, 1914-18), large scale
communist oppression (eventually totaling more than 60 million deaths)
and other governmental horrors. All told, politically connected deaths
of 170+ million in the 20th century showed the strong limitations of human-engineered
accelerating progress models, and of any imaginable human-centric
utopias, like those of More, Marx, and Spencer. Today the idea of accelerating
progress remains in the cultural minority, even in the developed world.
It is viewed with mild interest but also deep suspicion by a populace
that has been traumatized by technological extremes, global divides, and
economic fluctuation.

A Global Phase Change in
our Understanding of Universal Change  The 1930's

In my analysis to date, the most dramatic "phase change" in
our collective understanding of the nature of change appears to have began
in the 1930's, a transition that was directly related to the major advances
in physical theory, via Albert Einstein in relativity and Niels
Bohr, Werner Hiesenberg and Erwin Schroedinger in quantum
mechanics, which occurred at this time. These advances, most notably the
discovery of hidden continua and quantizations of matter, energy,
space, and time, gave scientists worldwide a new confidence that our
entire physical environment could be accurately modeled with quantitative
and qualitative tools, and launched a quest for understanding and unification
which has burned brighter, faster, and stronger every year since.

We must also acknowledge a debt to speculative fiction for developing
the collective vision of the scientific, technical, and lay communities
beginning around this time. Perhaps the first popular confrontation of
the technological singularity occurred in a science fiction short story
by the legendary John W. Campbell, The Last Evolution (in
Amazing Stories, August 1932, and The
Best of John W. Campbell, 1976). Here Campbell contemplates the
ever-accelerating implications of computers gaining the ability to design
even more powerful copies of themselves. Often directly motivated by Campbell
and his successors, a long chain of scholars from different disciplines
have confronted this fascinating idea in subsequent years. [But unfortunately,
as Judith Berman notes ("Science
Fiction Without the Future," 2001), modern science fiction increasingly
avoids the growing challenge of thinking about accelerating technological
change.]

During the 1930's, the pioneers of modern information and computer science
also began asking a series of questions that are fundamentally related
to the issue of accelerating change. Is computation a framework that can
describe all physical interactions? Can we show that computing done on
one physical system is equivalent to that done on another? Are there questions
a computing system can ask that can never be answered by it? And in the
boldest question, is there evidence that the universe itself is a unitary
system for computation? If so, we can examine a variety of separate processes
of physical acceleration, so called "exponential and asymptotic domains
of physics" such as those that produce black holes (cosmological
singularities), and for the first time, understand them all as
related forms of universal computation.

In 1931, one of the most important mathematical insights to date was
made by Kurt Gödel, in the form of the Incompleteness
Theorem. This concept allowed us to understand that every finite
computational, formal logical system must have areas of intrinsic uncertainty,
undecidable questions that can neither be proven nor disproven from within
the system. Presumably, the persistence of these uncertainties and their
interaction with the physical environment spurs the creation of increasingly
more sophisticated physical-computational systems over time, in a process
of hierarchical emergence over universal history.

The idea of a universalsymbolism has very long and rich history
in philosophy and logic. It was perhaps first clearly advocated by Gottfried
Wilhelm Liebniz, co-inventor of the calculus, back in the 1680's (for
more, see the excellent History
of Philosophy: Descartes to Liebniz, 1976). But a key successor
idea, the hypothesis that all physical systems can be described in
comparable computational terms, even when done by very different entities
(molecules, human minds, or technological machines) took the "phase
change" of the 1930's physical and logical insights before it could
arrive.

It was first formalized by Alonzo Church,Alan Turing, and
Emil Post in a series of working hypotheses beginning in 1936.
They proposed the existence of a type of "universal computation",
through logically equivalent "finite state machines" (later
called Turing machines), and this formalization came to be known as the
Church-Turing thesis in computer science. The C-T thesis was a
major breakthrough in our suspicion that computation underlies and unifies
physical reality.

In 1938, Harvard poet and polymath R. Buckminster Fuller
published Nine
Chains to the Moon, a creative rant on the nature of world systems.
Chapter 38, "Ephemeralization," posited that in nature, "all
progressions are from material to abstract" (ephemeralization, a
form of digitization), and "every one of the ephemeralization trends..
eventually hits the electrical stage" such that even "efficiency
(doing more with less) ephemeralizes". This idea would eventually
mature into a leading candidate for a physical driver of sustained acceleration
in technological systems. In 1939, an obscure Physical Review paper
by J. Robert Oppenheimer described how a star might theoretically
collapse into an object so dense not even light could escape its gravitational
clutchesthe first modern discussion of the accelerating physical
phenomena that were later to be called black holes.

The Roots of Applied Computer
Science and Military "Big Iron" Computing  The 1940's

In the 1940's, during a very dramatic chapter of human history, the necessities
of WWII gave rise to our founders of modern computing such as Konrad
Zuse,Alan Turing, and John Von Neumann. Building
on the prehistory of mechanical computing, as first explored by such pioneers
as Charles Babbage and his "Difference Engine" (1871)
these individuals were the first to create truly sophisticated and functional
large scale digital computational devices. Not unexpectedly, they were
also early explorers of both artificial intelligence and accelerating
technological change as topics of serious inquiry.

In particular, both Turing (see The
Universal Computer, 2000), and Von Neumann (John
Von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing, 1990) were important
early explorers of the idea of ongoing computational acceleration, and
of the computational nature of both human and universal intelligence.
It appears that Von Neumann may have been the first, some time in the
late 1940's or early 1950's, to use the mathematical-physical term "singularity"
to describe his vision of a coming "runaway" progression in
computational events (see Vernor Vinge's "The
Coming Technological Singularity").

At the same time, the prospect of humans designing friendly, non-monstrous
artificial intelligences was first seriously explored by such science
fiction greats as Isaac Asimov, and stories utilizing his "Laws
of Robotics" (co-formulated with John W. Campbell) began appearing
in 1940. In 1947, at the same time John Von Neumann was having his singularity
insights, the French researcher François Meyer wrote "L'acceleration
evolutive. Essai sur le rythme evolutif et son interpretation quantique".
This paper may have been the first simple log-periodic acceleration model
applied to evolutionary history. If so, Meyer's model should include a
finite time singularity at some particular future date, but I have not
been able to access and translate the original as of yet. (See also Meyer's
1954 essay, "Problematique de l'evolution."). Also in 1948,
French historian Daniel Halévy published "Essai
sur l'acceleration de l'histoire (Essay on the Acceleration of History)
which has been called "penetrating" by some social historians
(Alain Silvera, 1966).

Also in 1948, Claude Shannon wrote A Mathematical Theory of
Communication, thereby creating a new field, information theory, and
a new model of the world in which the currency of all computers and communication
channels could be quantitatively unified under the idea of binary digits,
or bits. Thereafter, the double exponential growth in speed, capacity,
and power that occurs in these unique physical systems would become readily
apparent to all who would choose to measure it.

Early Digital Physics and
the First Commercial Big Iron  The 1950's

In the 1950's, Norbert Weiner (beginning with Cybernetics,
1948), Von Neumann, and a number other pioneers of electronic computing
began to apply the theorems of computer science to all the laws and systems
of the natural world, sometimes poorly, sometimes indiscriminately, but
occasionally with real success. One still unknown innovator of these ideas
at that time was Ed Fredkin (and Tommaso Toffoli somewhat
later), who introduced and greatly refined the idea of treating
the physical universe as a unitary computing system, a paradigm
which came to be known as digital physics in subsequent decades.
A history of this profoundly important and still little-discussed development,
including the concept of the universe as a type of cellular automaton,
can be found at Fredkin's excellent digital
philosophy website.

The idea of universal computing also achieved perhaps its first major
popularization at this time, from Isaac Asimov in a famous 1956
short story, The Last Question. In this story, the universe is
proposed to be a self-organizing computational system that ultimately
defeats entropy by recreating itself in a recursive manner. This speculative
idea, universal rebirth as the only way around "the entropy problem,"
represents the most credible solution to the question of the long term
survival of universal intelligence that has yet been proposed. The influence
of this little story an its successors on the Western scientific heritage
has grown steadily since, and is often underestimated.

Another major information processing modelling success of this decade
was Frank Rosenblatt's powerful perceptron model of the
human neuron. First published in 1957, it spurred the early development
of neural networks. This same year, the launch of Sputnik propelled
the US-Soviet cold war in the direction of a sustained thirty year space
race, one that peaked in intensity with the first moon landing in 1969.
The post-Sputnik generation saw the last broadly-sustained promotion of
science and technology education and application in our great nation,
which has grown far too complacent since. [People do their best with a
coach and a few common, well-defined goals. I have proposed elsewhere
that the development of cheap, ubiquitous broadband connectivity and a
conversational user interface, both locally and
globally, should be today's primary technology goal, the galvanizing U.S.
"Moon Shot" of the early 21st century.]

Ongoing informal discussions by visionaries in the scientific community
at this time led to such contributions as Richard Feynman's ("There's
Plenty of Room at the Bottom" 1959), a revolutionary article that
implicitly assumed accelerating change would continue in a very important
new domain, miniaturization.

The Great Goal of Science
and Technology and The IBM System/360  The 1960's

The 1960's were driven by a can-do, space race optimism. John F. Kennedy's
rousing speech in 1961, met with tremendous public support for this very
costly venture, and sci-tech development became our national Great Goal.
This engendered a new popularization of futures thinking, and new understanding
of accelerating change in the scientific and engineering communities.

In 1964, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observing manufacturing
trends in the new medium of integrated circuits, made his now famous observation
that circuit densities were doubling every 18 to 24 months, and would
continue to do so for the forseeable future. At first, Moore's law simply
defined the economic and engineering environment specific to computer
hardware development, and gradually an entire industry of scientists and
engineers came to not only intellectually appreciate, but to tangibly
experience the local effects of continuous accelerating change. Throughout
the 1960's and 1970's a growing number of insightful analysts, engineers,
systems theorists and cyberneticians developed models of reality which
began to incorporate trend curves of accelerating computational change,
and these strong-growth-assuming models made their way into various industry
and generalist publications, most prominently, Scientific American.
Also in 1964, the first affordable integrated computer system emerged,
IBM's radically innovative System/360.

Following the excitement of the New
York City World's Fair (1964-1965) and it's many optimistic, future-oriented
exhibits (e.g., Bell Telephone's PicturePhone, G.M.'s Futurama: Cities
of the Future), and riding the rising enthusiasm of the pre-Apollo era,
serious futurist thinking beyond the science fiction authors and academics
first came into its own. Yet both of these groups still had much to contribute.
Of particular note, Stanislaw Lem, published (in Polish only, unfortunately)
his nonfiction human-machine convergence masterwork Summa
Technologiae, 1964, and I.J. Good ("Speculations Concerning
the First Ultraintelligent Machine," 1965), published in a professional
publication (Advances in Computers) what was perhaps the first
clear conceptualization of the coming technological singularity, moving
the topic another step closer to legitimacy. In 1966, the great historian
Alfred Toynbee, wrote a chapter, "Acceleration in
Human History," in Change and Habit (1966) which, like Henry
Adams, charts a series of rapidly accelerating phases of biological and,
with the emergence of humans "1Mya," technological acceleration
in Earth's history. Toynbee charted the same pattern to a lesser degree
in religious development, while noting it's ambiguity in political forms,
and its apparent absence in such domains as art. He also briefly speculates
that human consciousnes and culture form the start of a "metabiological"
phase of planetary development.

Leading the popularization of futures scanning, scenario, and trend analysis
in this fertile time was Edward Cornish's World
Future Society, and the bi-monthly publication of The
Futuristmagazine, beginning in 1967, as well as Olaf Helmer'sInstitute for the Future, a research-oriented
think tank started in 1968. By the close of the 1960's no one in computer
science really knew how long curves of technological acceleration might
last (excepting a very limited number of visionaries like Von Neumann
and Lem, as mentioned), or how relevant they might be to the larger world
of human affairs. But the gate was open, and the concept of the singularity
was finally a viable inquiry (though one with professional risk to discuss
too openly or forcefully, particularly in conservative academic circles).

It was also during this decade that the physicist John A. Wheeler
coined the term "black hole" to describe the final accelerating
developmental stage of sufficiently massive stars, still-theoretical entities
whose subsequent structure would become impenetrable from our universal
vantage point.

Increasing Social Awareness
of Acceleration and the Minicomputer  The 1970's

In the 1970's, the idea of accelerating change as a permanent feature
of modern life entered broadly into the public consciousness with Alvin
Toffler and his revolutionary Future
Shock, 1970. The first and second chapters of Shock, "The
800th Lifetime" and "The Accelerative Thrust," remain as
engaging as they day they were written, an eloquent overview of the profound
speedup that technology has brought to modern life. Shortly afterward,
Scientific American editor
and polymath Gerard Piel wrote a less well-known but equally prescient
work, The Acceleration of History, 1972, which considered the ongoing
acceleration of science and techology, and the many social implications
of continued exponential growth. Throughout this period the implications
of Moore's law as a signifier of accelerating computationally-driven scientific
and social change became increasingly understood by systems thinkers.

Also beginning in 1970, F.M. Esfandiary (later, FM-2030)
published a series of short, accessible, and passionate works of technology
optimism that assumed and began to explore the integrative, efficient,
and self-balancing features apparently emerging within technological systems.
His three major works, Optimism
One, 1970; Up-Wingers:
A Futurist Manifesto, 1973 and Tele-Spheres,
1977 were eventually republished in accessible paperback form in 1977
and 1978, becoming known as the "Transhumanist Trilogy," and setting the
stage for the Extropian and early transhumanist social movements of the
1980's.

At this time Carl Sagan published The
Dragons of Eden, 1977, a seminal book that brought the "Cosmic
Calendar" metaphor to mass public attention, dramatically demonstrating
that important emergences of universal complexity appear to have occurred
in an ever-accelerating manner through at least the last six billion years
of universal developmental history.

Where did the Cosmic Calendar metaphor originate? We are not yet clear
on this point. My colleage Ted Kaehler reports that when
he took ninth grade biology from "Mr. Peterson" in Palo Alto,
CA in 1965, he used the calendar analogy. He recalls that one calendar
year was mapped to the age of the Earth, and students were consistently
amazed at how recent homo sapiens was. He suggests checking high
school geology and biology texts from the 1960's to discover where the
calendar metaphor was first used. What is clear is that after Dragons
of Eden (1977), and Sagan's Cosmos television series (1980)
a very curious phenomenon, our apparently universal record of accelerating
development, had finally entered the mass consciousness.

The roboticist Hans Moravec also emerged on the public scene in
this decade. Moravec is arguably the most important single pioneer
and advocate of deep thinking on accelerating computational change in
the 20th century. He began writing about exponential growth in computer
power beginning in the mid 1970's while working at the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). His fascinating June 1974
essay "Locomotion,
Vision, and Intelligence" led to a 1976 essay, "The
Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" and an even bolder piece, Sept
1977's "Intelligent
Machines: How to get there from here and What to do afterwards" (incorporating
1974's "Locomotion"). These essays were widely xeroxed and commented on
in the SAIL, MIT-AI, and Carnegie Mellon University-AI communities at
this time, as well as migrating to the computer science departments at
other major universities, such as the University of California. If I recall
correctly, a graph of Moravec's accelerating computer power curves even
made it into Ted Nelson's visionary computer futures work, Computer
Lib / Dream Machines, 1975.

In Feb 1979, after two years of editorial delay, Moravec's ideas finally
reached the general public through Analog:Science Fiction
and Fact, in an essay titled "Today's
Computers, Intelligent Machines, and Our Future." The last section
of this groundbreaking essay "considers the implications of the emergence
of intelligent machines, and concludes that they are the final step in
a revolution in the nature of life. Classical evolution based on DNA,
random mutations and natural selection may be completely replaced by the
much faster process of intelligence mediated cultural and technological
evolution." Considering the future of computer-human coevolution,
Moravec concludes we are rapidly headed for a post-biological form
for all local, living intelligence: "In the long run the sheer physical
inability of humans to keep up with these rapidly evolving progeny of
our minds will ensure that the ratio of people to machines approaches
zero, and that a direct descendant of our culture, but not our genes,
inherits the universe."

This may turn out to be a fundamental insight into the future. At the
same time, it is one so simple and elegant that I also arrived at it privately
in 1972, as a young high school student contemplating the nature and purpose
of human existence. I'm sure many others did as well.

'Cambrian Explosion' of
Complexity Science and The Personal Computer  The 1980's

The 1980's saw a modern version of the "Cambrian Explosion" in our scientific
understanding of accelerating computational change within various specialties,
with simultaneous breakthroughs in the study of complexity, artificial
life, neural networks, connectionist and parallel computation, and several
other fields best left for a "Longer History." Sagan's enormously successful
public television series Cosmos,
1980 also introduced the Cosmic Calendar to an even wider audience, and
futurists such as John Platt ("The Acceleration of Evolution,"
The Futurist, 1981) and others chipped in with their take on the
central acceleration.

In 1981, in Critical
Path, Buckminster Fuller published an expanded
version of his concept of ephemeralization, the apparent driver of accelerating
change, "the invisible chemical, metallurgical, and electronic production
of ever-more-efficient and satisfyingly effective performance with the
investment of ever-less weight and volume of materials per unit
function formed or performed". In Synergetics
2, 1979, he defined ephemeralization as "the principle of
doing ever more with ever less weight, time and energy
per each given level of functional performance"(italics mine). Such
statements provide what may be among the first published descriptions
of what we may call the STEM
efficiency/density or generically, "compression" of computation,
independently derived by myself in the 1970's, and first published at
this website in 1999. STEM efficiency is the idea that the leading edge
of local complex systems always discover how to do more computing with
less space, time, energy, and matter per salient computation (however
measured), due to special preexisting universal structure. They naturally
run down a STEM efficiency and/or STEM density gradient, built into the
physics of the macrocosm, microcosm, nanocosm, and eventually, femtocosm.
The idea of STEM compression / ephemeralization seems the current
leading candidate for the central driver of the accelerating technological
change we see today.

In January 1983, revisiting and extending Von Neumann's insights, an
up-and-coming science fiction writer by the name of Vernor Vinge, writing
in the First Word column of Omni Magazine, introduced the idea
that the ever-accelerating evolution of computer intelligence itself might
soon produce a kind of technological singularity, "an intellectual transition
as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole,
and the world will pass far beyond our understanding." Vinge concluded
in this prescient piece, as I did independently in 1972, that inevitable
technological singularities in intelligent civilizations represented the
most logical explanation for the "vast silence" of
the cosmos. This silence is commonly known as Fermi's Paradox, after Enrico
Fermi, who first popularized it in 1950.

By the mid 80's, consideration of accelerating change from a systems
perspective finally became broadly accessible to the general public, through
groundbreaking popular works by such authors as Marvin Minsky (Society
of Mind, 1985), Erik Drexler (Engines
of Creation, 1986), and Hans Moravec (Mind
Children, 1988). These three books respectively represented a
theory of mind as an emergent collective computational system, a framework
for applying computation and embodied environmental interaction on as-yet-undreamed
scales of miniaturization, and the first coherent projection of the meaning
of robotics and the new computer and cognitive sciences for the future
of mind in the larger universe. These early authors risked professional
reputation in their own fields to advance their unique ideas, and each
deserves special recognition for their courage, conviction, and clarity
of vision.

During this same decade Stephen Wolfram, a key thinker in digital
physics, and one of the creators of the Mathematica modelling software,
became a leading investigator into the life- and physics-simulating properties
of cellular automata (CA). His recent synthetic work, A
New Kind of Science, 2002, presents further evidence of the value
of the CA paradigm, and is well worth investigating. In 1987, Pierre
Grou, a pioneering French economist and systems theorist, noted in
L' Aventure Economique that economic evolutionary development since
the neolithic period can be described in terms of a hierarchical emergence
of "dominating economies" (e.g., Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium,
Southern Europe, Netherlands, Great Britain, United States, China?), all
driven forward in an accelerating crisis/no-crisis pattern. He would develop
this fascinating insight into more formal singularity models in later
years.

This productive decade also culminated with a provocative presentation
in 1989 by John A. Wheeler (of "black hole"
fame) entitled "It From Bit." In this famous speech Wheeler advanced
the idea that every "it" (every particle, every field of force, even the
fabric of the spacetime continuum) derives its function, meaning, and
existence from a series of binary choices, or "bits" available to it.
Physical reality, in this perspective, arises from the posing of countless
numbers of these binary, yes/no questions among the its, as they construct
their interrelationships in an inexorable computational process. As another
refinement, evolutionary developmental ("evo-devo") biologists
(e.g., Rudolf Raff, The
Shape of Life, 1996), began to carefully explore the interaction
between evolution and development in biological systems over long spans
of time. Evo-devo biologists made it possible for systems theorists to
begin to consider that complexity emergence may proceed via both
evolutionary and developmental processes over universal history, and to
admit that we are only beginning to understand the fundamental difference
between the two.

As yet, few scholars in the domain of digital physics have considered
the developmental implications of our planet's accelerating history of
local computing (e.g., Moore's law, Vinge's Technological Singularity,
Kurzweil's law of Accelerating Returns) when considered within both a
universal and multiversal framework. I have made such a proposal in my
developmental singularity hypothesis, and I expect
significant new work in this area will eventually be forthcoming.

Early Singularity-Awareness
and The GUI-based Internet  The 1990's

In the 1990's, a flood of publications that were implicitly singularity-aware,
and a bold few that were explicitly singularity-aware, such as those by
John Brockman (ed., The
Third Culture, 1995), Damien Broderick (The
Spike, 1997) and Richard Coren (The
Evolutionary Trajectory, 1998) became available to the general
public. Broderick's work is noteworthy in that it is quite accessible,
and the first lay publication on the topic of the singularity. Coren's
text is pioneering, and quite useful in this early era of singularity
studies, in that he applies a logistic model to events in cosmology, biology,
civilization, and sociology. His analysis proposes a global phase change
singularity, an "instantaneous" rate of meaningful physical
change (at least as seen from our slowspace perspective) circa 2140± 10 years (2130-2150).

What must happen after this point? Coren cites the famous systems theorist
Derek De Solla Price, who suggests a "Sorites Paradox"
solution. In the Sorites Paradox, the Greeks noted that often in life,
an increasing quantity or capacity of some object eventually enables
a qualitative change in the nature of the object. The engineer
and futurist Brad
Holtz states something similar, as a general rule of thumb: "Three
orders of magnitude allows a paradigm shift."

When do you have enough grains of sand to call a sandpile? Enough
fax machines to form a fax network? Enough local computation for
autonomous machine intelligence to emerge? At the phase change,
the process being examined changes its nature in such a way that the quantity
being measured no longer captures some of the key qualities or dynamics
of the emergent entity. A singularity has occurred.

Also of note in the 1990's, the transhumanist philosopher Max More,
the artist Natasha Vita-More (Extropy.org),
the economist Robin Hansen,
the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom (Transhumanism.org),
again Hans Moravec (homepage)
and most centrally, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor
Vinge, inhis seminal "The
Coming Technological Singularity," 1993, brought many of these
ideas to serious critical attention with their excellent discussions of
the singularity meme and its variants using the mass medium of the new
millennium, the Web.

But perhaps most visibly, and most importantly for the public consideration
of these ideas, inventor and artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil
published two seminal books in this decade, Age
of Intelligent Machines, in 1990, and Age
of Spiritual Machines, in 1999. The former book makes a case for
the astounding growth in computational complexity in recent decades, and
the reality that A.I. must play a central role in 21st century life. The
latter book takes these ideas much further, and is our recommended introductory
primer to singularity ideas for the lay public.

In this same decade, Eliezer Yudkowsky also developed prolific
writings in the technological singularity, a community of A.I. investigators
and "singularity advocates",
and a nonprofit A.I. venture with
transhumanists Brian and Sabine Atkins. Finally, in 1999 I started
Acceleration Watch.com as a generalist website to educate lay thinkers on
issues of accelerating computational and technological change.

Small Steps Toward Singularity
Studies and a CI-based PlanetNet  The 2000's

In 2000, Laurent Nottale (an astrophysicist), Jean Chaline
(a paleontologist), and Pierre Grou (an economist) published an
admirably interdisciplinary paper, "On
the Fractal Structure of Evolutionary Trees," which applies log-periodic
analysis to the main crises of evolutionary civilizations. They followed
this up with a groundbreaking book, Les Arbres de l'Evolution(Trees
of Evolution), 2000, which models universal, life, and economic
development all on a fractal, log-periodic acceleration. This book has
several similarities to Richard Coren's, but makes a case for a more rapid
acceleration on a planetary scale. Grou and the others note that hierarchical
events emerge in an accelerating alternation of crisis and plateau, punctuation
and equilibrium. Their acceleration model reaches a macro-scale singularity,
a global time critical, at 2080 ± 30 years (2050-2110).
The trio continue to publish (note this 2002
essay) on their fractal model for acceleration, and with luck their
ideas will gain wider critical consideration in coming years.

We can note here that the crises (whether galactic supernova, extinction
event, or economic crash) they use as chart points are locally debilitating
but they never slow down the log-periodic acceleration of the network.
What I call the average distributed complexity (intelligence, interdependence,
and immunity) of the network always accelerates, quite smoothly when viewed
from the perspective of the network as a whole. Catastrophes are locally
disruptive but nonlocally educational and catalytic. This is a heartening
and enlightening realization.

In 2001, complex systems scholar Didier Sornette and physicist
Anders Johansen published a paper, "Significance of log-periodic
precursors to financial crashes." They noted that hierarchical emergence
to new regimes often involve an accelerating approach to a finite-time
singularity, followed by a phase transition, which may or may not be locally
"catastrophic," as in a financial crash. They started to believe
that this pattern could be used to predict some stock market crashes months
before they actually happen. This led Sornette to publish a fascinating
work, Why
Stock Markets Crash, 2003. This book gives a tour of the theory
of critical phenomena, and then applys a log-periodic model to historical
economic crashes. Sornette and Johansen's model predicts a critical time
for global phase change at 2050 ± 10 years (2040-2060),
and they offer three scenarios for the meaning of this change: 1) economic
collapse, 2) a transition to economic sustainability, or most interestingly,
3) superhumanity.

I find the first scenario unsupportable from systems theory (e.g., a
global singularity could be locally catastrophic, but would be catalytic
to the global network). The second scenario is best seen as a subset of
the third (intelligent technology, far more resource efficient and inner-space
oriented with each new generation, can be expected to be an exemplar of
immobile sustainability from the human perspective). The third scenario
seems to be the essence of the present dynamic, from my perspective. Successively
accelerating waves of automation cause the economic shocks we experience.
If the model is correct, these wave fronts are likely to arrive at increasingly
rapid rates and yet be progressively briefer and more locally confined
in their "catastrophic effect," while being globally catalytic
in the process.

Sornette, Anderson, and colleagues have developed models for anticipating
both local economic crashes, and for interpreting the log-periodic data
of the entire economic history of civilization. While their macrohistorical
analysis might be quite insightful, their attempt to decipher the local
signatures of finite-time singularities in either individual or global
economic systems may or may not turn out to be predictively valid (they
predicted a 1990's Nikkei crash in advance, but have few data points at
present).

If the dynamics of hierarchical emergence are fractal, and we see finite-time
singularities leading to phase transitions everywhere, this still doesn't
guarantee us that we can see local patterns as easily as we can see the
Big Picture ones. Indeed, I'd argue the opposite. In an evolutionary developmental
universe, the vast majority of local change appears to be driven by deterministic
chaos, by strange attractors, and the noise of pseudorandomness might
easily obliterate signal on a local level. My intuition tells me a predictive
model could work very well at the network level, but would be much less
reliable describing dynamics of individual nodes. We shall see.

At present, in 2005, only a few tens of thousands of individuals have
been exposed to the singularity meme, mostly through the web. But soon,
the general concept of the singularity is likley to become at least a
bit more broadly known, though still not yet mainstream.

Promisingly, Ray Kurzweil has published an excellent precis "The
Law of Accelerating Returns," (2001) of his forthcoming book
The
Singularity is Near, 2005. In 2000 he also created a prominent
website showcasing these future-relevant ideas, KurzweilAI,
headed by transhumanist editor Amara Angelica. Kurzweil's next
work will go a long way toward making the general, professional, and scientific
communities aware of the implications and inevitability of continuous
accelerating change, and is the latest in a long tradition of careful
popular analysis of these topics.

The physicist Seth Lloyd, in two bold, insightful, and well publicized
digital physics papers ("Computational capacity of the universe,"
Physical Review Letters, 2002, and "Ultimate physical limits
to computation," Nature, 2000, has also advanced simple and
powerful conceptual models of the intrinsic limits of universal computation.
Such models may yield significant singularity-relevant insights into the
developmental future of our universe, as I argue in my own forthcoming
work.

Additional important authors from this rich history of increasing awareness
of accelerating computational change may be seen on the Speculative
Topics page of this site. Happy reading!

The New
Accelerators: Computation, Engineering, and Science

Recalling the initial A.I. optimism of the 1960's, both conservative
and many embarassingly ambitious [1,
2, 3,
4, 5]
grass roots, boutique, and startup A.I. projects are again flourishing
in software and hardware. But this time around there are countless effective
proprietary implementations as well (ie, HNC'sneural
networks, Xilinx'sFPGAs,
Chameleon'sRCPs
or Google's use of Beowulf clusters)
which have solved important human problems and made fortunes for their
inventors. Nanotechnology (both computational and general) makes
its own bold strides, through pioneers like Jim Von Ehr at Zyvex
, as well as broadly within MEMS, microphotonics,
microfluidics, materials science, solid state physics, and many other
domains. The autocatalytic loop is well underway, following myriad pathways
toward greater systems complexity.

To get an overview of topics and players in A.I., Stuart Russell
has a nice introductory portal, A.I.
on the Web. At some point, if you plan to contribute to the development
of this field, you will need to decide which of several useful intelligence-building
strategies seem most important and relevant to your own personal path.

From my own generalist's perspective, there are three strategies that
seem particularly important: 1. Evolutionary computation (evolvable
hardware and software) and knowledge representation (classic
A.I.), 2. The cognitive and neurosciences (decoding the essential
structure of the human brain using molecular, cellular, organismic, and
social sciences), and 3. Electrical engineering and general I.T.
(processor, computer, network, and systems design and manufacture). I
currently think they will be necessary to the task in that priority order,
and consider these the three most interesting and robust current research
paradigms where continued breakthroughs are likely to catalyze the development
of sophisticated A.I. I may be misconstruing or leaving something out
entirely here, of coursethat's part of the excitement of the quest,
for the full story of emergent A.I. has yet to unfold.

Many, many other institutions, publications, technological systems, and
individuals could also have been mentioned in this "Brief History"this
essay showcases only the more historically relevant or more singularity-aware
individuals who are helping us to gain a conscious understanding of the
accelerating manner in which we are co-creating our complex future. If
any reader thinks I've made mistakes, misrepresentations, or omissions,
please let me know. Most of the credit, as always, should go the vast
majority of unsung individuals and institutions who work daily to improve,
speed up and balance the myriad technological systems of our lives, perhaps
without conscious recognition that they also play a role in some deep
universal developmental process.

The Near
Future: Gradually Increasing Social Awareness of the Singularity

Even though we futurists observe continously accelerating (and ever more
"self-catalyzed") computational and technological change, we should not
expect a continuously accelerating recognition of this within human society.
On the contrary, human social systems in recent decades have shown evidence
of "saturation," or a definite maximization in their rate of comfortable
absorption of new products and ideas, leading us to such healthy countertrends
as voluntary simplicity. Over the next decade we can expect increasing
articles on the singularity in popular magazines, and as this meme becomes
familiar to the general public, many more groups will weigh in with their
own unique perspective on the universal reasons for and likely future
directions of inexorable accelerating change.

But it is all too probable that most of humanity will contine to pervasively
ignore this phenomenon until it finally becomes "surprisingly apparent,"
some time between 2020 and 2060, depending on your analysis. Such seems
to be human nature, so our greatest challenge for the present may be an
educational one. As Glen Hiemstra of Futurist.com
likes to say, once we understand a paradigm, can start talking about the
kind of preferred futures we would like to see, but the broad understanding
and acknowledgement must come first. Our choice of the path we take now,
in the context of accelerating computational change, is always the issue
with greatest current relevance.

As acceleration watcher Robert Trask eloquently stated: "It
is tough to try to explain to someone what all this is about without coming
across as a fanatical moron. Oh well... [we] just need to learn more,
think more, and get better at it. I look forward to your newsletter in
the hope that I can better grasp this beautiful yet somehow horrific inevitability."

It is our still unrealized hope that we may grow to understand, to simply
and intelligently explain, and to scientifically demonstrate that the
accelerating transition to computational complexity occurring in the technological
infrastructure all around us, while we humans often strive for greater
simplicity and peace, on our own scale, is neither horrifying or dehumanizing,
but actuallyquite natural, balanced, self-protecting, and integral
to the inherent design of the universe.

The universe appears to be a system that produces complex, self-examining
subsystems which develop exponentially greater local 'modeling intelligence'
over time. Occasional catastrophes are an integral part of this creative
process, but they act as selectional and catalytic events at all levels,
apparently never threatening the informational content of the great bulk
of extant systems at any substrate scale. Furthermore, the more computationally
complex any local systems become, the more limited and constrained, and
the less subjectively violent the catastrophies they appear to endure.

Such observations evoke real optimism for the future, and at the same
time they inform our current personal and social choices. The insights
we gain in studying the evolutionary development of complex systems, at
all substrate levels, may deeply advise us of better vs. worse paths
we may take on a daily basis, as we move ever closerto the
apparently unavoidable universal attractor of human-surpassing technological
intelligence within the forseeable future.

Action
Items

For your part, you can promote the development of an evolutionary developmental
understanding of accelerating change whenever it seems appropriate. For
more, see Accelerating.org.
Thanks for reading.